Two to three times a year Elon Musk deliberately creates a crisis inside his own companies. He calls them "surges." And the reason he does it explains why SpaceX moves faster than NASA and Tesla moves faster than every automaker on earth. A surge works like this. Elon picks a target, sometimes urgent, sometimes not, and sets an impossible deadline. Then he orders all hands on deck around the clock until the deadline is met. Everyone works 16 to 20 hour days. Engineers sleep at the factory. Normal schedules are suspended. Isaacson witnessed one firsthand. On a Friday night at the SpaceX launch site in Texas, Elon became frustrated by a lack of progress. He ordered an immediate surge of 100 workers to work around the clock. There was no urgent launch date. No imminent deadline. He created the urgency out of nothing because urgency is the state in which his companies produce their best work. He told Isaacson the surges exist to "extrude shit out of the system." Complacency is the enemy. When things are running smoothly people stop innovating. They maintain instead of improve. The surge forces everyone back into survival mode where only the essential survives and everything unnecessary gets stripped away. Most CEOs create urgency in response to external threats. Elon creates urgency when there is no threat because he believes the absence of urgency is itself the greatest threat. The companies that moved humanity to electric cars and reusable rockets did not operate in a state of calm progress. They operated in a state of perpetual manufactured crisis interrupted by brief periods of recovery before the next surge began.